Chapter 2. Reading and Writing

In This Chapter

• Reading from filesystem

• Writing to filesystem

• Collecting data from forms

The conference room is filled with people who suddenly care passionately about what goes into the Web site, including a couple of people who only last week could think of nothing better to do than to stop by your cubicle to explain in great detail why the Web site thing was just a passing fad. Must be a very slow week for everyone except you.

The conversation quickly boils down to two main issues: Nobody can agree as to what to do with the home page, and everyone agrees that it's vitally important to collect more information from people who visit the site.

You wait a few more minutes to let the windbags do their thing, then you present your solution: a tip-of-the-day script that will randomly cycle any number of greeting messages on the home page of the site and a guest book to collect feedback from people who visit the site. Half the people in the room have no idea what you're talking about, but it's getting close to lunch time, so they agree with your suggestion.

You retreat to your cube, where you sit down to work with the two scripts in this chapter that let you add functionality to your Web site that involves reading from and writing to text files on the Web server.